Cissie

Just after noon one day last week at Dower House, the vast 17th Century Maryland manse that once housed the Earls of Calvert and Baltimore, a telephone rang. The Washington Times-Herald was on the phone; an editor had a message for his boss. The butler and maid went to wake their mistress. They found her in her big bed, slumped over a book and an early edition of her paper. A heart attack had killed copper-haired Eleanor Medill Patterson, 63, the vain, shrewd, lonely, and lavishly spoiled woman who used a newspaper to speak her whims with a quarter of a million tongues.

She had had plenty of warning. Five years ago, after a mild heart attack, her doctors warned her to ease up. Imperious Cissie Patterson went right on sipping Scotch & water and fine champagnes. She also went right on as owner, editor and publisher of the Times-Herald, which she had nursed to success after her friend William Randolph Hearst had failed.

Big Game. One of the wealthiest women in the U.S., and perhaps the most hated, restless Cissie left behind her a fortune of perhaps$40 million -- not counting the Times-Herald and her huge interest in the McCormick-Patterson Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News. Who would inherit all this? The first in line: her daughter, Felicia Gizycka and Granddaughter Ellen Cameron Pearson Arnold, child of Columnist Drew Pearson and apple of Cissie's eye. But nobody would inherit her deadly hates.

Eighteen years ago this week, when she sat down at the keyboard of Hearst's Herald, newsmen laughed. They knew Eleanor Patterson Gizycka Schlesinger, then 46, as a willful society woman turned big-game huntress and rancher, who had married a Polish count and regretted it, then a lawyer who died four years later. Even Hearst, who first hired her, underestimated her newspapering instinct, almost as keen as that of her brother, Joe Patterson, or Cousin Bertie McCormick.

Killing. In her first week as editor, she dictated an editorial sneer at Alice Roosevelt Longworth, one of her society foes. "Put it on the front page," she ordered. "Mr. Hearst says that's the only place where people will read it." Circulation, wallowing at 61,000, soon doubled as Washingtonians grabbed the Herald to see whom or what Cissie would spit at next.

In 1939, she bought both the Herald and the Times, and combined them into a round-the-clock daily. They had been losing $1,500,000 a year; the Times-Herald now makes a good $1,000,000 a year.

Her moods and feuds were famous and fearful. Once an admirer of F.D.R., she turned on him with the spiteful and scurrilous tag, "He lied us into war." In the same way, she turned on her once-loved son-in-law, Drew Pearson, and savagely attacked him in print.

At times a kind of megalomania seemed to possess her. At a dinner party she remarked to a friend: "You see those s.o.b.s dining in my home. As long as I can feed them, serve them champagne and have a larger bank account than theirs, I can buy and sell even their souls."

Flophouse Night. Her temper trapped her into fits of firing & hiring that she sometimes later regretted. "The trouble with me," she once reflected, "is that I am a vindictive old shanty-Irish bitch. I just cannot have friends for more than six months." She had to drink, she said, "because I have to forget all the mean things I have done."

There were also generous things, as her staff well knew. Around the office she was called "The Lady." The staff learned to be unconcerned when she drifted in, clad in slacks or riding breeches and leading a poodle or when she called at midnight to order a Page One makeover. She knew how to get stories too. She once walked out of an ambassador's dinner party, changed to old clothes, and spent the night in a flophouse to get material for a series on jobless girls.

When she died last week, the veterans of her staff went around with tears in their eyes. And the Times-Herald's Executive Managing Editor Michael Flynn, who survived all 18 years of her career, spoke the words that many newsmen could well repeat: "She was a hell of a sight better newspaperman than I am."

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